Steve Hochstadt: Extreme conservatives talk a lot about liberty. But their definition of liberty doesn’t always include my liberty. I want my police force to protect me from all kinds of threat, including those of the far right.

Mark Bowen: There may be nothing any of us can do about the way the media has been completely taken over by the charter school movement’s Thought Police, but that is no excuse for those who are supposed to be progressive making it worse.

Berry Craig: The poll numbers hint at the biggest GOP edge: the U.S. is the most conservative country in the Western democratic world. “Liberal” — which means centrist or center-left in other industrial democracies — is as far left as mainstream American politics flows. The U.S. is the only industrial democracy that doesn’t have a significant democratic socialist or social democratic party.

Michele Waslin: While the proponents of SB1070 say that Arizona will help ICE enforce immigration laws, the fact is that it would impinge upon ICE’s ability to fulfill its mandate, set enforcement priorities, and allocate resources effectively.

Andrea Nill: Proponents of Arizona’s new immigration law, SB-1070, have a new talking point: they are now arguing that if the Department of Justice (DOJ) is going to legally challenge SB-1070, it should also go after “sanctuary city” policies as well. “Sanctuary city” is a right-wing derisive term used to describe cities that have adopted community policing policies that prevent police from asking about the immigration status of or detaining and arresting immigrants solely for being undocumented.

Andrea Nill: Mike Huckabee defended SB-1070, telling Greta Van Susteren that Arizona was perfectly justified in passing the draconian immigration law partly because the state is the “number one kidnapping capital in the world.”

If Kucinich’s amendment fails, the fault will not be the media’s or political calculations or party discipline. The fault will be the extreme degree to which the health insurance companies own our federal government.

Wellness

Carole Bartolotto: The problem with concluding that GMOs are safe is that the argument for their safety rests solely on animal studies. These studies are offered as evidence that the debate over GMOs is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Environmentalism

Margo McCall: There’s increasing evidence that adopting a plant-based diet is better for human health, the planet, and of course for the more than 9 billion animals that are killed for consumption each year in the U.S alone.